The word 'critical" has three meanings which are dangerous, important, and disapproving. The purpose of this blog is to examine important or over-looked cultural, political, artistic, or historical issues of our time. Also, this blog is intended to be educational.

Monday, May 29, 2017

How George W. Bush Lied America Into A War And Divided A Nation

That one my smile and smile and still be a villain- William Shakespeare

The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical
weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the
British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little
as 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime has long-standing and
continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al Qaeda terrorists inside
Iraq. This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could
build one within a year. - A Radio Address by George W. Bush, September 28, 2002.

Something critical is
being lost in the torrent of pixels being spilled by the media as Jeb Bush
wriggles haplessly, like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber, struggling
to explain away, recast or rationalize his brother's hideous legacy. Many of us
with functional memories concluded long ago that Jeb's brother deliberately
lied us into a pointless war, one that resulted in pointless maiming and
pointless deaths of our own soldiers and perhaps a million Iraqi civilians, and
the equally pointless rise of a nihilistic cult of deluded savages we know as
ISIS.

And although many Americans, for various reasons, don't
want to face up to it, that is the truth.

There may be a "competing narrative," there may
be political "spin," but there really can only be one truth, and Jeb
Bush and the secretive billionaires who hope to install him as the country's
next President know that truth happens to be very, very inconvenient for him
when the country has not yet forgotten what happened the last time a Bush
occupied that office. When Jeb said he'd rely on
his trusted brother for foreign policy advice, that just made things
worse.

There is, however, an even more heinous aspect to what
Jeb's "trusted brother" did, and it shouldn't be allowed to escape
down the memory hole. We've been lied into
wars before, with similar disastrous results. But
George W. Bush did something far worse than lie us into a war: he did it in a
breathtakingly cynical and malevolent way - in effect, by holding a gun to
every Americans' head and threatening to pull the trigger. He did it by holding
the American people hostage to a twisted ideology that demanded the war, waving
the gun at calculated intervals in our face, the way any terrorist would.
And he told us flat out, over and over again, that if we didn't do what
he said, we'd all be killed.

Paul Waldman, writing for The Week, puts his finger on why what Bush did
was much worse than mere lying:
What the Bush administration launched in
2002 and 2003 may have been the most comprehensive, sophisticated, and
misleading campaign of government propaganda in American history. Spend too
much time in the weeds, and you
risk missing the hysterical tenor of the whole campaign.

Waldman has little patience for the suggestion that the
"intelligence" was "misread" or "misinterpreted."
For those who experienced it, the barrage of timed propaganda that supported
the "selling" of the Iraq war was no mere lie, no drummed up
"incident," but a deliberate, methodical and relentless campaign. In this campaign,
intelligence was not used to ascertain facts, but to fashion propaganda to sell
the war, the "script" of which, as then-White House Press Secretary
Scott McClellan later wrote, "had been finalized with great care" to
convince the public that the war was "inevitable and necessary."
Waldman recounts the purposeful planning and execution of the deception
inflicted on the American public and follows it with an irresistible and
damning conclusion:

In 2008, the Center for Public Integrity completed a
project in which they went over the public statements by eight top Bush
administration officials on the topic of Iraq, and found that no fewer than 935
were false, including 260 statements by President Bush himself. But the theory on which the White House
operated was that whether or not you could fool all of the people some of the
time, you could certainly scare them out of their wits. That's what was truly
diabolical about their campaign.

And in this we can see the base, criminal and yes, diabolicalnature
of what Bush did. By magnifying the imaginary threat allegedly posed by Saddam
Hussein, Bush managed to terrify segments of the American public who he and
Cheney knew full well were already traumatized and shell-shocked after the
horror of 9/11. By repeatedly raising the specter of "poison gas,"
the radioactive "mushroom cloud," and the "weapons of mass
destruction" he instilled Americans with a virulent fear, fear of the evil
unknown. And all the while he knew - they all knew- that it was a bald-faced
lie:

Saddam Hussein

Each and every time the message
was the same: If we didn't wage war, Iraq was going to attack the United States
homeland with its enormous arsenal of ghastly weapons, and who knows how many
Americans would perish. When you actually spell it out like that it sounds
almost comical, but that was the Bush administration's assertion, repeated
hundreds upon hundreds of time to a public still skittish in the wake of the
attack on September 11th. (Remember, the campaign for the war began less than a
year after the September 11th attacks.)

Sometimes this message was imparted with specific false
claims, sometimes with dark insinuation, and sometimes with speculation about
the horrors to come (We don't want thesmoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,
said Bush and others when asked about the thinness of much of their evidence). Yet the conclusion was always the same: The
only alternative to invading Iraq was waiting around to be killed.

By playing incessantly to their fears, Bush also succeeded
in turning Americans against each other and-anyone who raised his or her voice
to question the threat became part of the threat in the eyes of their fellow
Americans. After all, if you're terrified of something, and you know by
God the threat is real, someone next to you telling you not to worry, or worse,
ignore the danger, becomes as bad as the enemy.

This is what Bush (and Cheney) knowingly did to the
American people. He counted on their fear, not just Americans' fear of Hussein,
but of each other. Iraq became a "life or death" decision. It didn't
matter to him that their fear was generated completely by lies--all he needed
was the fear. It was a classic exercise in propaganda and, terror inflicted on a vulnerable
and scarred American public, the implicit threat always looming, hammered home
day after day to get the war he
and his cronies desperately wanted. And all of it deliberate:

Richard Cheney

This is one of the many sins for which Bush and those who
supported him ought to spend a lifetime atoning. He looked out at the American
public and decided that the way to get what he wanted was to terrify them. If he could convince them that any day now
their children would die a horrible death, that they and everything they knew
would be turned to radioactive ash, and that the only chance of averting this
fate was to say yes to him, then he could have his war. Lies were of no less
value than truth, so long as they both created enough fear.

This is the true horror of what George W. Bush did.
It was no mere "lie." It was something far more despicable,
that cuts to the core of whatever humanity or basic human decency he and his
family claim to possess.